Embedded

References

September 2015 meetup

The September 2015 talk was scheduled on Saturday, September 26, 2015 and I gave a talk on “G-code Visualization Tools”. The talk began with an introduction and history of G-codes. A Maya pyramid STL file was then used with Pronterface to generate the following G-codes:

I then gave a demo of “Yet Another GCode Viewer” written by Jonathan Winterflood that uses the Pyglet library to render the G-code paths. You can also zoom, rotate and scale the image after it has loaded the input data. The brim that is printed for 3D objects is clearly visible in the rendition. A screenshot is shown below:

Blender is a free and open source software for computer graphics, 3D modelling and animations. It is written in C, C++ and Python. A Blender gcode reader plugin written by Simon Kirkby exists to visualize G-codes. This plugin generates the image from the G-codes, and converts the change in paths into arcs for a smoother image. The advantage of this plugin is that you can use all the goodies from Blender and Python. A screenshot of the pyramid using the Blender plugin is shown below:

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is yet another free and open source software for image processing and visualization. It requires its input file in a VTK file format. After using the gcode2vtk utility to convert the Maya pyramid G-code file to a VTK file format, I was able to demonstrate the G-code path simulation using ParaView - a data analysis and visualization application. An illustration of the Maya pyramid in ParaView is shown below:

ParaView is written in C, C++, Fortran and Python. Both Blender and ParaView allow you to run simulations on the G-codes.

All the visualization tools discussed are free and open source software, and you can install them on your favourite *nix system.